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Friday, May 19, 2017

In spite of great efforts, India has failed to achieve in healthcare goals, badly lagging behind China, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in terms of accessibility and quality, as per the new Global Burden of Disease study published in the medical journal Lancet.

At the bottom, India came at 154th position in the ranking of healthcare quality in 195 countries, whereas some countries like South Korea, Peru and China have seen greatest improvements in healthcare access and quality since 1990.

China, with a score of 74 on the index, has been ranked at 82 - far ahead of India, and Sri Lanka has scored 73 on the index. Similarly, Brazil and Bangladesh have score 65 and 52 respectively.

Although India's score in the healthcare index increased by 14.1 points, from 30.7 in 1990 to 44.8 in 2015, the study found that the gap between the score and predicted score in the country has widened in the last 25 years.

The report also shows that India performed worse than expected in tuberculosis, diabetes, rheumatic heart diseases and chronic kidney disease.

"Despite improvements in healthcare quality and access over 25 years, inequality between the best and worst performing countries has grown," said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and leader of a consortium of hundreds of contributing experts.

Furthermore, he added in a statement, the standard of primary care was lower in many nations than expected given levels of wealth and development.

Countries with the highest scores in 2015 include Canada, Australia, Japan and much of Europe.

Among rich nations, the worst offender in this category was the United States, which finished a dismal 35th and tops the world in per capita healthcare expenditure by some measures.

Within Europe, Britain ranked well below expected levels at 30th.

Overall, the results are a warning sign that heightened healthcare access and quality is not an inevitable product of increased development.

The 32 diseases for which death rates were tracked included tuberculosis and other respiratory infections, illnesses that can be prevented with vaccines - such as diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and measles - several forms of treatable cancer and heart disease, and maternal or neonatal disorders